Henry Sutton: A Forgotten Genius

I've had an interest in Henry Sutton since 2002 when I was a student at the University of Queensland. It struck me as odd that someone of his intellectual calibre had been forgotten by the history books. This short post is a humble attempt to generate a modicum of recognition for a forgotten genius

1853: H.R. Sutton
and his wife, Mary, immigrate from Manchester (U.K.) to the Ballarat
goldfields.

1854: H.R. Sutton
makes a concertina to keep himself entertained at night on the goldfields. He
ends up entertaining the other miners and makes some more concertinas for
friends. Mary, his wife, convinces him to buy a dray-load of instruments from
Melbourne which they sell on the goldfields. This marks the beginning of the
Sutton Music Emporium.

1856: On the 3rd
of September, Mary gives birth to Henry.

1866: A ten year-old
Henry writes a paper on the theory of the flight of birds after observing the
flutter of insect wings against smoked glass. It is published 12 years later by
the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain in their 1878 annual report.

1870: After a
three year period, Henry has read every scientific book in the Ballarat
Mechanic Institute’s library. In the same year he designs and builds an ‘ornithopter’:
a clockwork flying machine. These are the first flight experiments conducted in
Australia using heavier-than-air materials.

1870: Henry
designs an electric continuous current dynamo with a practical ring armature. A
similar device had been invented by the Italian, Antonio Pacinotti on the 10th
January 1859.

1871: Z.T.
Gramme, a Belgian inventor, shows his improved version of Pacinotti’s invention
to the French Academy of Sciences. It is known as the Gramme dynamo and uses
the same design principles as Henry’s device. History records Gramme as being
the father of the electrical power industry.

1875: The
Reverend John Kerr, a Scottish university lecturer, invents the Kerr cell and
publishes a paper on what becomes known as the Kerr effect.

1876: H.R. Sutton
dies. Suttons Music Emporium is now run by Henry’s mother and brothers with 19
year-old Alfred as manager.

1876: Alexander
Graham Bell receives his patent for the telephone (7th March 1876).
Henry reads a brief article on Bell’s invention and within twelve months he
designs and builds twenty different versions. Some of them are installed in the
music emporium. Sixteen out of twenty of Henry’s designs are patented by
others.

1877: At the
request of F.W. Brearey Hon. Sec., Henry submits two papers to the Aeronautical
Society of Great Britain. They are titled ‘On the Flight of Birds and Aerial
Navigation’ and ‘Second Paper on the Flight of Birds’.

1878: Both of
henry’s papers on bird flight are published in the Aeronautical Society of
Great Britain’s 1878 annual report.

1879: Thomas
Edison invents the carbon lamp.

1880: Henry,
working independently from Edison, develops a carbon lamp. The Victorian
Government Astronomer, R.L.J. Ellery, verifies the success of Henry’s work.

1881:

·
Henry marries Elizabeth Ellen Wyatt.

·
By now Henry has invented a colour printing
process, a torpedo, and a telegraph facsimile.

·
Royal
Society of Victoria. Transactions and Proceedings, 18 (1881), publish
Henry’s article on ‘A New Form of Secondary Cell for Electrical Storage’.

·
Royal
Society of Victoria. Transactions and Proceedings, 18 (1881), publish
Henry’s article on ‘Description of a Vacuum Apparatus’.

·
In December Henry’s paper on ‘A Type of Lead
Storage Battery’ is read before the Royal Society of London.

1882: The details
of Henry’s Mercury Air Pump are published in English Mechanic and World of Science, 21st July 1882,
and are recommended to be used in the manufacture of light bulbs.

1883: henry
begins to lecture at the Ballarat School of Mines in the field of Electricity and
Applied Magnetism. He continues to lecture there until 1887.

1884:

·
Alfred opens a Sutton’s Music Store in Elizabeth
Street, Melbourne.

·
The music firm becomes known as ‘The Sutton
Brothers’.

·
The four brothers form a private company
‘Suttons Pty Ltd’.

·
Paul Nipkow, an Austrian engineering student,
invents the Nipkow Disc. This carefully perforated disc allows for the
electronic scanning of a moving image at the rate of ten images per second.

1885: According
to W.B. Withers of Ballarat, Henry designs the Telephane. This is a method of
transmitting moving pictures over great distances. It uses Nicol prisms, Nipkow
discs and a Kerr cell in its design and relies on the telegraph wire as its
mode of transmission.

1886: Henry is
granted a patent for ‘Improvements in Electrical Circuits for Telephonic
Purposes’ (Victoria).

1887:

·
Henry is granted a patent for ‘An Improved
Process of Converting a Photographic Image on a Gelatine Surface into a Relief
or Intaglio Printing Surface (New South Wales and Victoria).

·
In New South Wales, Henry also applied for a
patent for ‘Explosion Engines’.

1890: Henry
submits a paper that details the workings of his ‘Telephane’. It is published
in both The Telegraphic Journal and
Electrical Review, 7th November 1890 and La Lumiere Electrique. Paris, 13 December 1890.

1900-02: Henry
builds several motor cars with carburettors of his own design. At one point, he
teams up with the Austral Otis Company to go into manufacture.

1902: Henry
marries Annie May Patti.

1903: At a
meeting of fifty-five motorist at the Port Phillip Club, 9th
December 1903, Henry moves the resolution that founds the Automobile Club of
Victoria.

1912: Henry
Sutton dies from heart failure and chronic nephritis (28th July
1912). He is buried at Brighton Cemetery and is survived by his second wife,
their two sons and two sons from his first marriage. He leaves property worth
nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty four pounds.

1924: John Logie
Baird demonstrates working television. It is, like Henry’s system, an electromechanical
device.

Henry Sutton's design for his 'Telephane'. The telephane was a mechanical television.

The Telephane: How Did It Work?

Henry Sutton’s design for transmitting moving pictures over
great distances relied on a transmitter and a receiver.

The Transmitter:

The Nipkow disc, as it was known, worked by using a rotating
disc with a pattern of spiral apertures that was placed in front of a selenium
background. To capture a moving image the disc was rotated before a moving
object and, had the effect of dividing the image of the object into a series of
light and dark lines. The light sensitive selenium behind the perforated disc
would respond to these changes by altering its resistance to electric current.

Sutton improved on the Nipkow disc by placing a series of
lenses both in front and behind the spinning disc to better define the
variation of light that registered on the selenium background. Images are
scanned at the rate of ten frames per second. The selenium plate was connected
to a circuit with a battery and a transformer.

Radio had not yet been developed so Sutton decided on the
commonly used telegraph line as his method of transmission. A simple
multiplexing unit was incorporated into Sutton’s design so that two signals
travelled through the telegraph line and arrived at the receiver
simultaneously. One signal was the variations in current produced by the moving
image; the other was the rotational speed of the perforated disc.

The Receiver:

Henry Sutton’s receiver is, in essence, a long tube with a
light source (lantern) at one end and a viewing aperture at the other. The
signal that has travelled via the telegraph line enters a de-multiplexing unit
so that the two signals are separated.

Light from the lantern enters the tube and is focused by the
first lens. The light passes through a Nicol prism to produce polarised light.
The light strikes the Kerr cell. Electrodes from the Kerr cell are fed the
signal derived from the changes in resistance from the selenium plate. Low
resistance is equivalent to a dark band on the transmitter’s selenium plate.
When this happens amount of electricity fed to the Kerr cell increases and it
becomes dark, thus blocking the passage of polarised light. The converse holds
true for lighter bands.

Fluctuating levels of polarised light leave the Kerr cell
and hit the second Nicol prism which only allows the polarised light from the
Kerr cell to pass. This polarised light is focused by lenses into a tight beam.The beam strikes a perforated disc (identical to the one in
the transmitter) that has been synchronised, via the telegraph line, to spin at
the same speed as the transmitter’s disc. Like the disc in the transmitter, the
receiver’s disc works with the fluctuating beam of polarised light to project a
series of light and dark lines to form an image every one tenth of a second.
The image is viewed by peering down the eyepiece.